UFC president Dana White: Fighting Words

Dave Deibert, Postmedia News09.17.2012

Ultimate Fighting Championship president Dana White speaks at a news conference in Calgary, Alta., Thursday, July 19, 2012. UFC 149 takes place in Calgary, on Sat., July 21.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntoshJeff McIntosh
/ THE CANADIAN PRESS

UFC president Dana WhiteMichael Nagle
/ Getty Images

UFC president Dana White speaks on Jan. 13 during a press conference to announce commitment to bring UFC to Madison Square Garden and New York StateMichael Cohen
/ Getty Images

Mauricio Rua (left) was congratulated by UFC president Dana White after winning the light heavyweight title against Lyoto Machida at UFC 113 in Montreal.Glenn Dextras
/ National Post

• College dropout, former boxercise instructor and fight manager-turned-UFC president; alongside high school classmates Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta, purchased company in 2001 for $2 million; once an estimated $40 million-plus in the hole, UFC’s value has been estimated at more than $1 billion in recent years

• White will be cageside in Calgary for the sold-out UFC 149 on Saturday night, the promotion’s debut in Alberta. Of UFC’s 178 prior pay-per-view and televised events since 2001, — from Las Vegas to Australia, Brazil to Japan, Sweden to Montreal — White has missed one.

••••••••••

• “You know, it’s weird because it feels like a very long time but yet it went really fast. My life goes by, like, (expletive) weeks go by in days. Months go by in weeks.”

• “F***. F*** is my favourite word, period.”

• “There’s a big misconception about Vegas. I’ve lived on the east coast. I’ve lived on the west coast. I’ve lived in places like (expletive) Levant, Maine. I’ve lived in Boston, Massachusetts. I’ve lived in Las Vegas. If you’re not a good parent you can (expletive) your kids up anywhere. It doesn’t matter where you live.”

• “You can’t be afraid of change and you can’t be afraid to fail.”

• “I had a paving job when I was in Boston — we used to pave roads and things like that — and then the bellman job that everybody knows. When I worked at that paving place, I worked for these (expletive) Italian maniacs, and it was all a bunch of young guys. We competed every day. We used to (expletive) run wheelbarrows and see who could do the most wheelbarrow loads, and who was the best guy, and who had the fastest crew and all that (expletive). The same thing when we were bellmen. Who took down what (expletive) bags, who did this, who did that.”

• “Normally when you’re young, you get these jobs that nobody gives a (expletive) about. It’s a paycheque. But every job that I’ve had, I tried to be the best at what I did. I’ve always had that.”

• “Clint Eastwood is the one guy, the only guy, I’d give a (expletive) that I’d really like to meet, sit down, talk to for 30 minutes. I’d better hurry up if that’s going to happen. I don’t know how much longer Clint’s going to be around.”

• “One thing that we’re not afraid to do is take chances. That’s all we’ve ever done since the day I said, ‘Hey, I think we should buy this (expletive) thing,’ and they said, ‘OK, let’s do it.’ ”

• “If you see me speak now, and I go out and I speak anywhere, I’ve (expletive) spoke at every school you can think of. I speak at Bill Gates’ CEO Summit in front of all the top CEOs in the world. Listen, name it and I’ve (expletive) spoke there and done it. When we first were getting licensed in the state of Nevada, one of the commissioners called me up and asked me a question. I literally, man, I’m telling you, I (expletive) froze. Froze. I froze to the point they had to get a (expletive) dolly up there (laughs), wheel me out and take me out of there. Somebody came and got me, sat me down next to Lorenzo, and he goes, ‘What the (expletive) was that?’ I go, ‘I have no idea, dude.’ ”

• “Working out these days makes me feel old.”

• “Today we’re at the Wynn. It’s lovely here. It’s one of the nicest, if not the nicest hotel, in Las Vegas and one of the nicest hotels in the country, with all the things that they offer here. I’m here up in this bad-ass bungalow, but this isn’t where I am on Friday and Saturday night. I hang out in low-key places.”

• “This job, in the early days when I first got in, it was crazy. It was like the (expletive) wild, wild west.”

• “God, I’d love to tell you something right now. The problem is, I get in these interviews with you guys, I want to say all this (expletive) I can’t say.”

• “Because we live from event to event, there’s never enough time to really catch up. I describe it like this all the time: it’s a (expletive) freight train. We’re not driving it. We’re getting off the tracks and get out of the way.”

• “That’s a tough one, man. I think if you look at the fact that people still know who the (expletive) PT Barnum is, you’d have to go with PT Barnum as No. 1. Um, I’d probably put Vince No. 2. Vince and Don are both up there in age. Vince is still in there, (expletive) doing his thing, cutting huge major deals. I would put Don King No. 3. Who else did you have? You’d have to put Arum in there, too. You have to put Arum in there. And if I had to be on there, I’d put me last.”

• “We go all-out. But it doesn’t mean that it’s going to work.”

• “I can say I’m a lot more mellow. If you took the first six employees I had and interviewed them about how I was and how I ran this company and blah blah blah, and then you took six people that work for me now, you’d have very different (expletive) stories. Very different stories.”

• “I wouldn’t say that I really admire anybody. I mean, I’m not like that.”

• “To be honest with you, without sounding (expletive) cliché or whatever, I admire the Fertitta brothers big time. If I had to say that I admired anybody, I admire them. (Expletive) smart. They’re the most normal, down-to-earth billionaires you will ever meet. They’re so (expletive) normal it’s abnormal that they’re that normal, you know what I mean?”

• “I think you’re asking me that question because when we do something like The Ultimate Fighter: Live and I go back the next year and say, ‘Well, that didn’t work too (expletive) well. Let’s try this again and see how this works.’ I might go back to The Ultimate Fighter: Live again after this (expletive) season. I don’t know. We’re not afraid to try things.”

• “We’ve revolutionized the fight business.”

• “My kids have asked me just about everything but that. I think my oldest went through a little spell there where he was, like, afraid to die, he thought everything he did he was going to die. I’m like, ‘Relax, son, you’re not going to die, OK? Not now, anyway.’ So he kind of got over that thing and we never really got there. But you know I’m not a religious person at all.”

• “Making new friends? I’m not looking for any new friends. This dude, me and this dude, have been friends since we were 12 years old. A lot of the people that I hang around with are the people that I’ve been friends with since I was a kid.”

• “Yes, I’ve been arrested a few times. Nobody’s ever asked me that. Ever asked me that. I’ve been arrested for assault. I got into fights when I was a kid. Street fights. Drinking as a minor. Stuff like that. Normal stuff that people get. I never robbed any banks or anything like that.”

• “Nothing. (Expletive) zero. I request nothing. Kea gets there the day before I get there and he makes sure that everything’s dialed in. He’s got the keys ready. The only thing I’m looking for is, ‘Where’s the gym in town?’ And that’s it. I don’t request anything in my room.”

• “I learn more from experiences than I do anything else.”

• “Felt like a failure? Hmm. I don’t know. You know this guy, I talked all this (expletive) about soccer, and that guy challenged me, that guy challenged me to soccer? I haven’t called him back yet. I keep putting it on the back burner, to play this soccer player at soccer. Because I know I’m going to fail miserably at that. So I think I haven’t failed because I’m avoiding failure (laughs). I’m (expletive) hiding from it. I owe that guy a phone call so he can whoop my ass in front of the whole world and prove that soccer, I guess, is the greatest sport ever.”

• “A friend is the guy that no matter what you did, no matter what’s going on in your life, no matter what you have, you can pick up that phone and you can call him and he’s got your back. He’s there if you need him.”

• “There’s been one time. If you look at all the (expletive) talk on the Internet, and all the stuff that people say, all the (expletive) tough guys here and there. It was actually at the fight, I think, at Ft. Bragg. I was walking through the crowd and people were asking for pictures, and there was this one guy standing there. He started saying, ‘Your fighters suck, this sport sucks, you guys are a bunch of (expletives).’ And he was getting, like, (expletive) crazy. Finally I said, ‘Shut the (expletive) up.’ And, like, all these people were around him, and everybody started cheering, so that made him get even crazier. That was it. That’s it, in 11 years.”

• “What you’re going to get out of me is what I really think and what I really feel.”

• “I’ve got no problem saying no.”

• “I don’t like to talk about myself and what I’ve done or whatever. It is what it is and people will decide eventually what I did and how (expletive) great people think I was.”

• “Army movies look cool, looks fun and (expletive). I can’t (expletive) even imagine being in the middle of that (expletive) and doing what those guys do. Do I consider myself a courageous person? Yeah, in certain ways. The balls that it takes to go out and do what those guys do every day is something that I can’t even (expletive) comprehend or wrap my brain around. And then there’s people who are courageous in other ways. You’ll have a family who has two handicapped children that they have to take care of, and every day they live for these people and they do what’s necessary to take care of these people. That’s (expletive) courageous.

• “I think courage is something that somebody would do that you would never even (expletive) dream of doing.”

• “I’m not afraid of death and I don’t have to believe we’re going somewhere when we die. But my wife is super (expletive) religious. She handles that business. I think it’s not a bad thing. I don’t believe in religion and I actually think that religion is bad for a lot of reasons. I think it’s the cause of a lot of violence and death and a lot of other things. But I don’t see the problem in telling your children you go to heaven someday. Let them grow up, get older, and figure out what they believe on their own. I don’t cram anything down anybody’s throat.”

• “You know what’s going to completely contradict what I just said to you? I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t do this. I can tell you right now, I’ve been in situations in my life where I’m like, ‘Dude, if you get me out of this one … ’ ”

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UFC president Dana White: Fighting Words

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